Jimmy Kimmel went on fellow comic Marc Maron's podcast-slash-psychotherapy-couch WTF to talk about his unusual career path. But he couldn't resist taking his famously neurotic host on a detour into some of his family issues, including the "very sadistic" mom who used to make him pay her begging homage and who pretended she was dead to make him cry.

"There's something wrong with her," Kimmel said, in apparent good humor. "But sounds like it's fairly benign," Maron offered diplomatically. Sure, Kimmel said. "It was funny for her. [And] there were no beatings." There's an audio excerpt above, and you can listen to the whole podcast here for more context. Whether you relate this information to Kimmel's sometimes odd relationships with women — how he never told Sarah Silverman she was pretty, how he conducted an apparently covert office affair with his assistant-then-writer-then-head-writer-then-long-term-girlfriend Molly McNearney and allowed allies to vociferously deny any relationship with the spoken-for woman — is entirely up to you.